s formidable
boorish mind drew the startling inferences of his burning faith. Without
any reserve he now accepted all the extremes of absolute determinism. In
order to confute indeterminism in explicit terms, he was now forced to
have recourse to those primitive metaphors of exalted faith striving to
express the inexpressible: God's two wills, which do not coincide, God's
'eternal hatred of mankind, a hatred not only on account of demerits and
the works of free will, but a hatred that existed even before the world
was created', and that metaphor of the human will, which, as a riding
beast, stands in the middle between God and the devil and which is
mounted by one or the other without being able to move towards either of
the two contending riders. If anywhere, Luther's doctrine in _De Servo
Arbitrio_ means a recrudescence of faith and a straining of religious
conceptions.

But it was Luther who here stood on the rockbed of a profound and mystic
faith in which the absolute conscience of the eternal pervades all. In
him all conceptions, like dry straw, were consumed in the glow of God's
majesty, for him each human co-operation to attain to salvation was a
profanation of God's glory. Erasmus's mind after all did not truly
_live_ in the ideas which were here disputed, of sin and grace, of
redemption and the glory of God as the final cause of all that is.

Was, then, Erasmus's cause in all respects inferior? Was Luther right at
the core? Perhaps. Dr. Murray rightly reminds us of Hegel's saying that
tragedy is not the conflict between right and wrong, but the conflict
between right and right. The combat of Luther and Erasmus proceeded
beyond the point at which our judgement is forced to halt and has to
accept an equivalence, nay, a compatibility of affirmation and negation.
And this fact, that they here were fighting with words and metaphors in
a sphere beyond that of what may be known and expressed, was understood
by Erasmus. Erasmus, the man of the fine shades, for whom ideas
eternally blended into each other and interchanged, called a Proteus by
Luther; Luther the man of over-emphatic expression about all matters.
The Dutchman, who sees the sea, was opposed to the German, who looks out
on mountain tops.

'This is quite true that we cannot speak of God but with inadequate
words.' 'Many problems should be deferred, not to the oecumenical
Council, but till the time when, the glass and the darkness having been
taken away, we